A main source of revenue for national television broadcasters and their local broadcast affiliates is the sale of broadcast airtime to advertisers that want to promote their goods and/or services. Similarly, cable network providers derive income from the sale of advertising time and cable subscription fees. Advertisers intend to target those viewers that are likely to be interested in their products and/or services. One common technique is to target viewers according to a particular type of television programming. For example, an advertiser may determine that men who watch sports are more likely to purchase a pickup or sport utility vehicle rather than another type of automobile. Accordingly, the advertiser may then purchase advertising space during a broadcast of a football game. Another common technique to target viewers is according to geographic area. For example, viewers in one local or regional area may likely be more interested in goods and/or services from a particular advertiser than viewers in a different area.
“Local ad insertion” is a business practice used by television affiliates, re-broadcasters, and service providers to sell advertising airtime for a limited geographical area. Local ad (i.e., advertisement) insertion was originally designed for analog television media and each different geographical area where advertisements can be inserted at the service level requires a different service to be continually available for each of the different local advertisements. The services, however, will carry the same content nearly all of the time, and only differ when local advertisements are inserted for a brief period of time. A standard released by the Society of Cable Television Engineers for program substitution and advertisement insertion for MPEG-2 broadcast systems is ANSI/SCTE 35 which details how splice points can be transmitted directly in an MPEG-2 transport stream. SCTE-35 is utilized for local ad insertion for MPEG-2 content.
Targeted advertising is a recent innovation that attempts to match up particular zip codes, households, or even individuals with different, targeted versions of advertisements. However, targeted advertising systems use current techniques adapted from, or intended for, local ad insertion to splice advertisements into a broadcast feed. The same inefficiencies of having to provide and maintain a separate copy of the service for each target area requires, and may exceed, hardware and bandwidth availability. Further, splicing for data stream substitution is a deficient technique for targeted advertising, independent of the delivery mechanism.
With the advent of digital video recorders, targeted advertisements that may be effective when initially distributed with broadcast content are likely ineffective when a viewer watches a recording of the program at some later date. Digital video recorders merely accentuate the problems that advertisers faced with VHS systems and later viewings of recorded programs. For example, a flower shop may purchase advertising time to include advertisements before Mother's Day along with a broadcast of a program. If the program is recorded, such as with a digital video recorder, and watched after Mother's Day, however, then the advertisements are ineffective and the associated advertising expenses are lost. Additionally, targeted advertising which is typically based on television programming content and/or geographic regions is still broadcast to a large percentage of viewers that are not interested in the goods and/or services being advertised. As such, content providers and advertisers both have an incentive to implement better technique(s) to target and deliver advertising messages to specific viewers.